Piezoelectric materials make very efficient and fast-acting electro-mechanical energy converters or transducers. Piezoceramics have been used as transducers for several years, but mostly in a resonant mode. Examples of application include underwater sound transducers for echo ranging and submarine detection, transducers for ultrasonic washing, milling, cutting and welding machines, transducers for medical acoustic imaging devices, sound generators for alarms, and high frequency loudspeakers. There are some applications in which piezoceramics have been used to produce discrete motion rather than oscillatory motion. Due to the very small dimensional change produced in simple piezoelectric bodies, special configurations have been developed for the purpose of achieving the largest possible dimensional change. One type of actuating element is a so-called "stack motor", which is a stack of many individual piezoceramic wafers connected mechanically in series and electrically in parallel so as to generate the largest possible expansion and contraction without the need for unreasonably high voltages. Stack motors are relatively quite expensive. Another type of piezoelectric actuating element developed for achieving large motion is known generally as a "bender" or "bimorph" or "bilam". A bender consists of one or more piezoceramic wafers several mils thick, fired and polarized, and then bonded to a metal support sheet. In symmetric benders, the metal support sheet is along the neutral axis, where neither compression or expansion occurs, and is flanked by two or more piezoceramic wafers, polarized and energized in such a manner that the wafers on one side of the support sheet contract, while those on the other side expand, thereby causing the element to bend when a voltage is applied to its electrodes. Bending motion, however, is limited to a small fraction of the length of the bender, about 20 mils in the case of a bender 1.5 inches long. This limitation is due to the brittleness of the piezoceramic wafers. There is no practical method for producing large motion strokes, in particular large rotary motion strokes, by means of a piezoceramic element. Rotary electric actuators have therefore been of the magnetic type, and magentic motors are vastly less energy-efficient than piezoelectric motors and become increasingly less efficient as they are scaled down to smaller and smaller size.